A team of Japanese researchers from Keio University in Tokyo have demonstrated that an amoeba is capable of generating approximate solutions to a remarkably difficult math problem known as the “traveling salesman problem.”

Yet as these Japanese researchers demonstrated, a certain type of amoeba can be used to calculate nearly optimal solutions to the traveling salesman problem for up to eight cities. Even more remarkably, the amount of time it takes the amoeba to reach these nearly optimal solutions grows linearly, even though the number of possible solutions increases exponentially.

For now, however, the Japanese researchers’ experiment remains in the lab, but it provides the foundation for low-energy biological computers that harness the natural mechanisms of amoebas and other microorganisms to compute.